John Peart began exhibiting his work in the mid -1960s after arriving in Sydney from Brisbane, and was soon to achieve national prominence in the ground breaking exhibition ‘The Field’ in 1968 (National Gallery of Victoria/Art Gallery of New South Wales) with minimalist shaped canvasses. His adherence to minimalism was brief, however, and for the majority of his career his work was characterised by the expressive, lyrical abstraction evident in his earliest work, inspired by the landscape of his semi-rural home on the outskirts of Sydney, at Wedderburn.

In the 1960s, the early years of his career, Peart made a large number of drawings. Exploratory and calligraphic in nature, he sought to capture the immediacy of the painting experience, in spontaneous drawings and paintings on paper considering colour, space and form.